I beckoned Silky to me with a psychic call. She crouched behind and put her arm around me.
The mayor gloated with glee shining in his eyes, and began to reset his helmet.
“His movements are slow,” I whispered to Silky. “Uncoordinated.”
“And that means he has no suit AI,” she replied. Hope fluttered in my heart, but did Silky understand what to do?
“Silence!” boomed the mayor at a deafening level.
“Stay away from McCall and his gun,” he told Silky. “I don’t want to shoot you just yet. As for the others…”
Silky gave me a slicing strike to the neck. It hurt but the blow that should have stunned me was deliberately off target – just for show, a distraction to the real assault she made on my spine, which hurt far more. Oh, yes.
Her hands had always looked delicate to me, but her people had evolved from predators, not tree-hopping fruit munchers like mine. She ripped my clothing, and thrust a hand through the hide of my back, gouging a route into my spine.
I held my scream inside as she twisted part of my back, and kept on violating the artificial organs that ran down my spine until… until all color, sound, and meaning drained from the universe, and I was watching myself from a distance of thousand light-years.
“What is this?” said the mayor. “Why did you do that?”
“So I wouldn’t hear NJ complain when I do this.” Silky came at the mayor, wrapping her legs around his waist and clinging onto his neck.
I looked on without interest. I possess the memory, but the memory lacks meaning. I was no more engaged with the scene before me than a simple camera understands the photons passing through its lens. I was a mechanism, no more.
Silky kissed him on his darkened helmet visor, while running a hand over his armored chest that left a thick trail of my blood. “Let him live a little longer. Please, I’ll do anything.”
Without caring or understanding, I saw movement as the AI casing she had pressed against his chest port was absorbed by the battle suit, its cyber ports unprotected by the absent combat AI it was designed to carry.
“A delectable offer,” said the mayor, and then flung Silky hurtling along the lawn and out of my field of view. I heard her cry of pain, and the way it was cut short, but I couldn’t stir myself to turn my head and see.
The mayor gave a little, amplified laugh. “Regrettably, my pert little alien, I have work to do. Killing all your friends, starting with…” He loomed over my kneeling form. In that suit he could easily crush my skull to pulp, I began the faintest inklings of engagement with this situation.
He lifted his armored foot, but it did not descend on my head.
“What have you…?” he began, but it was a female voice that spoke next through the suit speaker. “Promise me you’ll grow your beard back, Ndeki. You look ridiculous.”
It had been many decades since I’d heard that voice outside of my head, but its familiarity worked me a little into the external world.
“Who are you? Silverberg asked the combat suit.
“I’m his wife. The mother of his dead child. The one who has looked out for Ndeki since he was sixteen years old, and that’s why I don’t like you for a start, Rachel Silverberg.”
“But we’re on the same side,” Silverberg protested.
“You… are… a nasty… Nasty… Nah… nah…”
Silence.
I have no memory of what the others were doing during the long pause before white noise exploded from the combat suit’s speaker.
The suit danced.
Arms pumping hard, Sanaa stomped boot-shaped craters into the lawn while her helmet jerked in random orientations, and all the while the noise the suit blurted out obliterated all other sounds with sheer volume.
All right, I don’t suppose the fusion of stored human personality and combat AI that had simmered in my spine for many years was actually trying to dance. But without Sanaa’s ghost, my mind was so reduced that it latched on to the first interpretation it could map Sanaa’s actions onto, and halted there.
The noisy suit’s dance took it closer to my position with every step.
Silverberg kicked me. Hard. “Wake up, McCall. Your allegedly loving late wife is going to kill you.”
“Never,” cried Sanaa. “Never… Never… Ne… ne… ne…. n…”
Sanaa’s combat suit came to a complete halt.
I looked on as motors whirred inside the suit and it suddenly flew apart in a spray of hot fluids. The suit stayed upright, but its front had hinged open, to reveal the mayor inside, naked and coated in lubricant.
He flopped forward onto the oily grass like a newborn animal slithering in its own birthing fluids. Emergency de-suiting was never a gentle experience, and even though this newborn’s head was hidden inside a combat helmet, I could tell from his heaving chest that he was gasping. But he recovered rapidly, too fast for Silverberg who had approached the vulnerable mayor, but now shrunk back.
I flinched as he ripped the pipe out of his anus. Then the mayor struggled to his feet, removed his helmet, and grinned, the radial burst on his left cheek seeming to wink at me.
The scene brought up powerful memories. Of my squadmates de-suiting at forward operating bases and shipboard armoring compartments. All of us emerging with a pipe up our ass and tubes to handle our other needs. No one cared about the ungainly sights and smells. We were just ecstatic to have lived, although Bahati always complained about the lack of solid food. Likely a good part of the happiness came from the drugs our suits constantly passed through our bodies, but the happy highs of de-suiting were better than the usual dehumanizing effect of the combat drugs.
I remembered the grab-assing that came with de-suiting when I was an eager, young cadet.
I remembered the knowing glances exchanged with the Sarge when I was a weary veteran corporal.
I remembered holding hands with Sanaa.
I remembered being a Marine.
“You’ve been an amusing diversion,” said the mayor, grabbing the flenser gun out of the combat suit’s dead fingers. “Now it’s time to kill you.”
It’s difficult to describe my reaction because it was as if I had been reset to factory default settings. I couldn’t form coherent thoughts, nor emotions, I was reduced, stripped down, yet honed.
I saw an immediate threat and did what any Marine would do.
I grabbed the gun I’d dropped at my feet and shot the mayor dead. Once through the head, and another round through the heart for good measure.
I assessed the impact on the target, and found it consistent with the norms inflicted by plasma rounds on unarmored flesh. Critical organs had been vaporized, the surrounding area cauterized into a sooty, black crust. The target was no longer a threat.
Around me I saw faces looking at me strangely, as if I’d done something important, but when Silky had ripped Sanaa from my spine, so much of my mind had been torn out with her that I couldn’t understand what was happening. My head was stuck on the last memory that seemed important: the fear blossoming on the mayor’s face in the instant before I ended him. There was no room for anything else. No need.
We appeared to be out of immediate danger, and that meant I no longer had a function.
I lost interest, and my memories ceased.
— CHAPTER 64 —
Apparently, I was a hero.
Not that anybody would use those words.
Rachel had captured all the events that morning with her evidence recorder, which for the most part was a basic camera, microphone, and microwave and radio wave wideband receiver, but had the distinction of being so comprehensively timestamped, ID’d, and encrypted that it was admissible in court as evidence. Her account uploaded to the datasphere as soon as the main force shield lifted. Most importantly she had recorded the part where Mayor and Acting Governor Philamon Dutch was shot resisting legitimate arrest by an FIA agent.
Merely stunned after being thrown by Dutch like a bowling ball, Silky had retrieve
d Sanaa’s AI casing from the combat suit and replaced it in my spine. I slowly came back into the world. Sights and sounds returned but I could think of nothing to say for a very long time. I was back but I wasn’t seeing the world in quite the same way. My psyche was rebooting into a slightly altered configuration.
I called for Sanaa.
In my distress and confusion, it was the most natural thing in the world. Most of my life, if I needed a hand to hold or person to explain to me why the endless horror wasn’t meaningless, it had been Sanaa. She was all I had ever wanted; I eventually understood that she was there but she was somehow unable to answer.
I realized after a while that all the time I had been sitting there propped up against a tree, there had been someone sitting in front of me, watching as life returned to my eyes. It was an alien. Beneath a coating of mud and filth, I could see she was white skinned and black eyed.
A while longer and I remembered this alien was important to me.
After that, my life rebuilt itself in my head at a dizzying pace.
I held out my hand, and Silky snatched it in both of hers, giving a yelp of pleasure.
“The Littoranes…?” I asked, the words forming with difficulty.
“Were magnificent,” she said. “Injured, but they will recover. I speculate they will boast of the scars they won today.”
I looked at her. Filthy. Exhausted inside and out. Under her shirt, those bruises still covered her torso, but her main hurt was elsewhere. I could sense painful memories just beginning to scab over.
“Let’s go home,” I said.
“We cannot. Silverberg says she needs your witness statement ASAP.”
I laughed. “Silverberg can go vulley herself and her witness statement.” I got to my feet and Silky did likewise. “I resign her deputy FIA field commission. And if she wants to stop me, she’ll have to shoot me.”
“You’re a very annoying human,” said Silky. “I think that’s why I love you.”
I nodded, deeply satisfied. Everything was going to be all right.
Hand-in-hand we walked across the ornamental lawn, now pitted with dents and muddy channels, and stained with blood and armor fluids. We passed two police trucks with open rear doors giving a view onto sullen figures chained against bulkhead rails.
The CDF was here in force too: a squad of armored carriers backed up with three grav tanks, and troops covering all the approaches.
We passed Silverberg arguing with her former police colleagues, who were trying to interrogate some of the house staff. She pretended not to see us, which suited me fine. I was going back to our apartment for a shower and a sleep, and no one and nothing was going to stop me.
I figured after the month we’d just had, we deserved that much.
— CHAPTER 65 —
We returned to the apartment we hadn’t seen since we’d interrogated Silverberg in the bathroom. I laughed at that memory as I washed off the stink first, while Silky grabbed a snack. Silverberg had turned out all right in the end, but Silky… As we’d neared home she had grown closed. Probably just extreme fatigue, but… maybe there was more to her change in mood.
As if my thoughts had summoned her, the bathroom door opened. Silky strode in and stripped naked. Nudity never seemed to bother her, but I knew something was wrong because she dumped her clothing in a heap on the tiled floor instead of folding or hanging them, which she always did even if the clothes needed washing.
I felt the draft when she opened the shower door and stepped inside, sealing the two of us within what suddenly seemed a very cramped cubicle.
“I can’t wait all day for you,” she explained. “I’ve got my own dirt to wash away, and there’s more than just the physical stains.”
I could hear the dissonance in her voice. I wasn’t certain she was lying but there was a truth hidden beneath her words, and my worst fears filled the gap in my understanding.
“Silky,” I said quietly but firmly. “Tell me what the mayor did to you.”
“Drop it, NJ.”
I gently touched the back of her jaw where it joined her neck. It was the gentlest of touches, but when she shook her head, I didn’t let it break my contact. “I think you need to tell me.”
I wasn’t expecting the laugh that burst from her. “You are such a fussy-hen, NJ. It was horrible but I was lucky. The pain he inflicted was agonizing but purely physical. He…” She closed her eyes and turned her head away. “When the pain left me, it was gone. A hot shower and a good night in bed is what I need. Strong coffee in the morning might help.”
I didn’t believe her. I put my arms around her as gently as I could. Fates, she felt so small!
“It’s the truth,” she insisted. “It’s the thought of what he might have done next that terrifies me. Is that stupid?”
“No,” I answered, and held her until the trembling left her, and the panic had drained from her kesah-kihisia.
Silky eased me away. “If you want to help, the worst thing you could do is fuss over me like I’m a psych-wreck. I am not. You’ll do better by far to let me shower.” She made a series of choking noises in the back of her throat before mumbling something unintelligible that my mind interpreted as, “You can watch if you like.”
Roger that, Section Leader.
Human scientists had dragged together some words from a dead Earth language to give the Kurlei species a scientific name that translated to mammal-like alien.
As I watched my Silky lather up a squirt from my tube of cleanser, and soap her wet body, I knew that I didn’t like that term and never would.
By some mechanism I’d never inquired about and she’d never volunteered, Silky had progressively adjusted her outward appearance since she’d fled to Klin-Tula, becoming not only more human but more womanly. But her adjustments went only so far, and she told me she had already reached the limit of what she could or would do.
To see her naked, those limits were readily apparent. No one could mistake Silky for a human woman. She wasn’t mammal-like, or human-like or anything but Silky-like, and I didn’t want her any other way.
Silky was perfect just as she was.
The abdominal muscles beneath her taut stomach took the form of two concentric ovals, which meant whenever she sat up, it made her belly look like a great alien maw snapping shut. Her arms were inhumanly long and attached closer to the neck in a subtly apelike manner. Her nipples gleamed like obsidian jewels, which was certainly a draw to the eye, but when erect they took on an anti-personnel mode, sharp as spear points and hard enough to scratch through Marine flesh.
Water cascaded off those nipples, streaming in a pattern of such exquisite purity I could almost believe her breasts had evolved just to create those twisting, bubbling water channels.
Living with Silky meant an unceasing succession of surprises, because in many ways she was so similar to a woman, but sometimes took a large, sideways step away from normal human behavior. When I realized I had been staring at her breasts, I expected a human reaction from her: flaunting herself and enjoying my reaction, or signaling with a kick in the shins that my drooling attention was unwelcome. My Silky did neither. She hadn’t even noticed my stare. Her jaw was open and her tongue was licking the outside of her dark lips as she drank in the sight of my chest as if mesmerized.
A bubble of love burst inside me. With her strange ways, Silky could be infinitely endearing, and thanks to her kesah-kihisia there was no hiding the sexual excitement the sight of me was ratcheting up within her.
I slipped my fingers into the fronds on her head enjoying the softly throbbing feel of them, and guiding her head a little closer to my pecs so I could collude in her bizarre enjoyment of me.
She sighed – a short, hot gasp of contentment – and I found myself giving a groan of happiness in reply as I contemplated the threshold we were now approaching.
I’m not completely stupid. For months I’d been wondering with increasing frequency whether the day would ever come when I could desire he
r despite her inhumanity. Was that day finally here?
No.
That day had not come.
All the same, I licked my lips at the prospect of forbidden sexual pleasures opening up to me for the first time, as if I were a novice sneaking into the girls’ shower. (Not that I would know about that from personal experience.)
You see, in typical NJ fashion, instead of facing up to the need to overlook Silky’s differences, I’d disappeared for two years along a wide flanking route through difficult terrain, and ended up at a different location altogether.
I had spent all this time wondering whether I could desire her despite her inhumanity.
I couldn’t.
I desired her because of it.
Stunned by the immensity of this realization, all I could do was blink in a confusion made foggier by my ghosts not yet coming fully online. However, the instant I finally gave in to my desire, all my excitement was immediately sluiced away by the sight of her. Silky looked beautiful all right, but she was also bruised. The clinical beating delivered by Mr. Lee’s thugs had left an angry patchwork of lilac bruises over her belly, breasts and ribs, to which the mayor had added a fresh battering when he’d thrown her across his lawn.
I yearned to enfold her in my protective embrace, but I daren’t touch her in case I caused her pain.
“My back is not bruised,” she said in her alien voice that was sunlight casting rainbow shadows within perfect crystal.
She turned and I rubbed at the taut muscles that ran either side of her spine, beneath the smooth, white scales now slick with soap.
“Nor is my neck,” she purred.
I nuzzled her fringe of thin kesah-kihisia strands, and then pushed through to kiss her neck, long and delectable. Almost humanly feminine.
“Nor my buttocks…”
I stepped back to enjoy a good view of her soft mounds. Smaller than my normal taste but… I made a reconnaissance of one with my hand, and delighted at the way my fingers slid over her curves, soft, plump and yielding.
Second Strike (Revenge Squad Book 2) Page 30
